Man, it is a beautiful day today. Hey, guys. Claude Johnson here and I am very, very excited about our new DVD course called “Acoustic Guitar Toolkit”. It comes from Sol Philcox who is one of the hottest players in the national scene today. He’s the same guy that toured with Grammy winner Jake Owen.

Here’s a great exercise for building-up your accuracy and speed with the finger picking. What we’ve got here is basically a really simple G chord. We’re going to start [unintelligible – 00:30]. As you can see, we’ve got this little banjo roll thing at the end. That’s a good lick to know how to play

Country thumb picking technique, it’s kind of like a Merle Travis, Chet Atkins thing. This isn’t really like an accurate recreation of their styles because they really had, Chet especially, had a really unique and delicate and beautiful playing style that I can’t really recreate that. But I can take elements from that and the

Now we’re going to talk about some pick rhythms using a flat pick. This is going to be a different style. I want to move to a major key. We’re going to go for, I guess, kind of like a basic country sound in the key of G. I’m going to show you how you

So just the same as how we took the initial, the little, simple pentatonic phrasing and we turned it into a major by doing this little… We can use similar notes to get phrasing on the low E string as well, and it gives it more of like a major country type feel. We can’t

Now, the key part of this is getting the rhythm andit’s not quite so much like a country picking stylewhere you have to alternate really vigorously betweenbass notes. You don’t have to do that. It’s more likethe open E and of course the high E allows you to leaveopen strings and just kind of use

Check out more of Sol’s acoustic jammin…its some sweet picking and blues inspiration! Yes, I know the background is out of focus — that’s just the “intro” footage, its supposed to be like that 🙂

New Course from one of our favorite teachers — Sol Philcox. Yep, the same guy who brought us “Wicked Chicken Pickin Chops” and “Ultimate Blues Master Class” is back once again to show us a different side of his playing… Amazing! (I’ll be posting sample lessons soon) Please post your comment!